What is Audience Segmentation?

Audience Segmentation

When certain sites are focused on specific categories, advertising networks can use them to create
audience segments. For example, if a site is focused only on reviewing different cellphones
and laptops, the ad network knows that visitors to that site are likely to be highly interested
in devices, so it can put them in a “technology” subgroup. They do this so that, in the future,
they can better focus the ads they show to those types of users based on their interests.

The price paid for certain types of ads depends on how attractive the audience is, so ads in the Technology space are considered
very valuable and thus the price paid for them is higher. As a result, fraudsters really
want to hijack those higher paying ads and get them to display on their sites in order to
steal money from the ad networks (and whichever business is paying for the ads).

They do this by employing a number of bots, pretending to be real customers. These bots have no ability to click on or purchase
anything, so sending ads to them is pointless and ultimately, a waste of money. Because they
are indistinguishable from real site visitors, this also messes with a site’s demographics
about their users and their behavior, which is very confusing.

So how can you protect your business from advertising campaign fraud? The first step is to score the traffic visiting your
site for bots and fraud. Removing the ad networks that deliver the lowest quality traffic
will go a long way in preventing both basic ad fraud and retargeting fraud. The next step
is to score and assess the quality of each of your advertising campaigns to make sure you
aren’t wasting advertising revenue by chasing after bots. Removing or changing the campaigns
that are largely spent targeting bots will restore the usefulness of your advertising campaigns
and improve your ability to reach your real customers. The third step is to build better
audiences out of high-scoring traffic to make future advertising efforts even more effective.
NS8 Truestats
and
NS8 Protect for eCommerce platforms can do all of this and more.